Özet:

Studies with regard to environment had attention in early 20th century and this trend has thoroughly increased after World War II. After the term of environment is accepted as an economic term studies about it are getting deeper. Especially, the issue of global environmental pollution has been rising since 1990s and economies of the globe are busy to save environment by different public policies. There is a linear relationship between economic growth and environmental pollution. Even though studies conducted in the literature revealed different conclusions, the common feature about it is that the relationship between these two variables is strong. Commonly, economic growth and pollution have the same direction but some studies revealed that there is a negative relationship between these two phenomena. There are many different studies focus on CO2-economic growth relations in literature, but concept of this study is more comprehensive. The data includes 61 countries’ carbon dioxide emissions, population, level of per capita income, which of 27 are from high-income, 24 are from middle-income, 10 are from low-income. A Panel Data Analysis is conducted for the annual cross-country data which is between 1990-2013 (24 years, annual data) in order to examine relationship between economic growth and environmental pollution. The findings of the study are matching the general trend of literature. Three variables interact with each other. Population is granger cause of wealth and vice versa. At the same time time population is granger cause carbon emissions rate but there are no interaction from carbon emissions rate to population. On the other side, increasing of per capita welfare is granger cause of carbon emissions and vice versa. It is revealed in this study that there is a strong and important correlation between population, level of per capita income and carbon dioxide emissions.

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